Category: Web

On January 19, 2017 I made literary history by being the first author to livestream a reading of his own novel across Twitter and Facebook. From 8pm through 12:30am I sat in front of a row of cameras and read my entire novel, ‘A Confession,’ cover to cover, for the world to see and hear. During that broadcast, we also recorded a higher-quality video of the entire reading. It, along with enhanced audio quality, is now available on YouTube. This footage is the entire original live broadcast, first livestreamed via Facebook…

Mark your calendars people! On January 19, 2017 I will be doing a LIVE reading of my latest novel, ‘A Confession’ in its entirety and livestreaming the whole thing. The stream will start at 8:00 pm Eastern Time, and will be broadcast via both Facebook Live and Twitter/Periscope. Barring any technical difficulties, the plan is for me to read the entire novel, start to finish, all in one stream (with occasional breaks to use the restroom). So mark your calendars, and make sure you’re following me on Twitter and Facebook to be…

I’m trying an experiment. While I’m in-between books, I’ve released a very short story on Kindle. I have a few others in my drawer that could work as shorts as well. So I’m testing to see if people will buy a short story (I’m setting a 2500 word minimum) for 99 cents and if you can get a steady revenue stream by building out a catalog of these to go alongside your books. I could do a big collection / anthology, of course, but I feel like in the digital…

Since writing my latest book, ‘A Confession,’ I’ve gone through a series of back-and-forth conversations with myself about how to share this new work with the world. I’ve self-published before (twice) so I know that world pretty well. It’s filled with freedom and creative control and it’s a great solution for anyone who wants to get their work out there. It also hasn’t worked all that well for me. Part of that reason could very well be the quality of my previous work. I’ll be honest – some of it’s…

At the suggestion of an author friend of mine, I’ve gone ahead and created a Facebook page for my “author persona.” So, if you like any of the stuff I write, that’s the best place on Facebook to follow me. https://www.facebook.com/williamfaicher/

Every time I consider putting up a carousel on a property, I remind myself just how horrible of an experience every carousel I’ve ever used has been. Not to mention, there is no standard implementation out there that is immediately user-friendly as an interface. Today a friend sent me to http://shouldiuseacarousel.com. I recommend bookmarking it to visit every time you think adding a carousel is a good idea. “Carousels are effective at being able to tell people in Marketing/Senior Management that their latest idea is on the Home Page. Use…

Having been in the e-commerce space for quite some time now, there are a lot of standard actions that most sites tend to partake in – best practices, if you will. One of these is the use of security messaging online. This could be as simple as a privacy guarantee, or something more complex like a “guaranteed secure” logo or badge from a leading security firm. What’s interesting though, is that even though it may seem a given that reinforcing security measures on your site (especially in e-commerce, where payment…

Some time back, we identified an issue where customers were hitting product pages for our digital media content, but then abandoning the site immediately after. After seeing this, we dug in a bit further and saw that the majority of this was from customers coming directly to the site via Google or other search engines. The best way to get to the bottom of this behavior, we decided, was to put together a survey and ask customers why they were leaving. After gathering quite a bit of feedback, the reason…